After starting out as a breaking news and local politics reporter at The Boston Globe, with additional stints at publications like The Los Angeles Times and The Wall Street Journal, Wesley Lowery joined The Washington Post in February 2014.

That same year, Lowery was named “Emerging Journalist of the Year” by the National Association of Black Journalists.

Lowery’s beat at The Washington Post focused on Congress, but this changed, to say the least, when Ferguson happened.

Lowery was in the middle of it all.

“I had a background in metro reporting, specifically around issues of race and policing, so I got sent to Missouri to cover the protests and the unrest,” he told Rare. “For the first two days I worked the streets, sending some of the most detailed national reporting of the story out to our millions of readers.”

Lowery, you may recall, was one of two reporters arrested while reporting from a Ferguson McDonald’s. That arrest occurred in August 2014.

One year later, Lowery received a summons.

“I maintained, from the first day, that our detention was illegal and unnecessary,” he said. “So I was surprised that a year later this is something officials in St. Louis County decided was worth revisiting.”

Despite these events, Lowery says he has not been deterred. Instead, he is motivated.

“My job is a devotion to the truth, and not a devotion to anything else,” Lowery told Rare. He said that he is inspired by those he works with every day.

“I’m inspired daily by my colleagues and mentors, specifically many of the other black journalists who came before me,” especially those who worked in newsrooms, “where they were the only ones who looked like them or the only ones who were committed to telling the stories of people who looked like them.”

Looking ahead, Lowery plans to use his platform at The Washington Post to tell those stories and to, “hold powerful institutions in law enforcement and criminal justice accountable.”